Creating chassis and interface ping poll definitions

Use the Poll Definition Editor to create chassis and interface ping poll definition types. The results of a ping poll are stored as 0 if the ping operation fails or 100 if the ping operation succeeds.

About this task

You perform identical steps to create a poll definition based on all the above poll definition types.

To create a chassis or interface ping poll definition:

Procedure

  1. Click the Administration icon and select Network > Network Polling.
  2. Click Add New New button.
    The New Poll Definition Type Selection page is displayed.
  3. Select Chassis Ping or Interface Ping from the list.
  4. In the Poll Definition Editor, under the General tab, complete the General Properties fields as follows:
    Name
    Specify a unique name for the poll definition. Only alphanumeric characters, spaces and underscores are allowed.
    Type
    This field is disabled. The Polling engine, ncp_poller, automatically populates this field once this poll definition is included as part of an enabled poll policy.
    Event ID
    This field is disabled. The Polling engine, ncp_poller, automatically populates this field once this poll definition is included as part of an enabled policy. The Event ID field is populated as follows:
    • If this is a new poll definition, then the Event ID field is populated with the value POLL-polldef, where polldef is the name of the current poll definition.
    • If you created a poll definition by copying an existing poll definition, then the Event ID contains the same value as the copied poll definition.
    Note: Some of the older default polls have Event ID fields that do not use the POLL-polldef naming convention.
    Event Severity
    Specify a valid number for the severity. The severity level must correspond to a valid severity level as defined in IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus.
    Description
    Type a short description of the poll definition.
  5. Click the Classes tab. In the Classes tree, select the check boxes of the required classes.
    Attention: If you leave all classes unchecked, then the system polls all devices that match the scope defined in the poll policy that uses this poll definition.
  6. Optional: Click the Interface Filter tab and build the filter against the required fields.

    The Table field is prepopulated with the interfaces table.

    Note: When polling for interface data (not ping polling or remote ping polling), by default, all interfaces in the SNMP interfaces table of the device are polled, whether they were discovered or not. Interfaces might not be discovered if you configured interface filtering for discovery, or for some other reason, for example that they were inaccessible at discovery time. Undiscovered interfaces are still polled unless you configure a filter on the interface records in the NCIM database for the poll. If you add any interface filter to this poll, the filter is applied to the interface records in the NCIM topology database, and only those interfaces are polled. Only the subset of the discovered interfaces that also matches the filter is polled.
  7. Click the Ping tab and complete the Ping Properties fields as follows:
    Timeout
    Specify, in milliseconds, how long the polling process should wait for a response from the target device before sending a new ping packet.
    Retries
    Specify how many times the polling process should attempt to ping the target device before giving up. When Packet Loss metric collection is enabled, the polling process sends this number of ping packets regardless of whether a response is received.
    Collect Ping Metrics
    Response Time
    Check the box to collect the time taken by devices to respond to a ping request. Response time is stored as the time in milliseconds between when the ping request was sent out and when the response was processed. If no response is received then the value of -1 is stored.
    Packet Loss
    Check the box to collect data about lost packets. Packet loss is stored as the percentage of packets lost, which is in turn determined by sending multiple ping requests and calculating the percentage of lost packets.
    Payload Size
    Select the size of the ICMP packet to be used for the ping request. Select the default (32 bytes) or choose a custom size. This setting overrides the value of IcmpData in the NcPollerSchema.cfg configuration file.
    CAUTION:
    Using a size smaller than 32 bytes may result in packets being dropped.
  8. Click Save, then click OK.